Category: Lessons In Business

Based on LinkedIn endorsements, my profile makes me look like I’m an expert in SEO. Perhaps this is because 7 years ago, I was doing a lot of stuff in the SEO world and it was one of my first skills recognized on LinkedIn. Today, I’m not an expert in SEO. I have a stale knowledge of how SEO worked 7 years ago with Google Page Rank, using the terms that you want to optimize consistently and naturally throughout your post content, making sure you mark up the key terms in headers, titles, etc.

I’m not an SEO expert nor do I really want that skill on my resumé. I guess need to spend some time on my LinkedIn profile so that it gives a more accurate representation of me. Update: I found a way to bury SEO down on the Skills & Endorsements section.

If you have worked with me recently, will you do me a favor and please endorse some of my more current skills (Account Management, Product Management, Family History, Genealogy)? Only do this if you think the skill(s) really deserve endorsement. Thank you!

It’s been a great week at the Agile 2011 Conference. I’ve attended a lot of really good sessions, a few awesome sessions, and luckily only a couple of “meh” presentations. I feel like my mind has been expanded greatly and I’m very excited to come back to the office with some of the new things that I’ve learned.

Here are some of my key takeaways:

Self-Organizing Teams

The team decides how they will work together, they set rules, and work together in ways that will help the team succeed. Managers empower, facilitate, communicate the “big picture”, set vision and goals, and remove impediments.

Focus on Strengths

By focusing on the strengths of the teams, the team members can use their skills to the best of their abilities. This can be done by letting the team members pick their own tasks and share their strengths or abilities with others. By focusing on individual strengths and working on building those strengths, the individuals will grow faster than by focusing on weaknesses.

People Are Motivated by Autonomy, Purpose, and Mastery

When an employee is compensated fairly, autonomy, purpose, and mastery become much greater motivators than $$$. Money motivations are actually detrimental to knowledge workers. They begin focusing on the wrong things and their work is lower quality. By giving knowledge workers the ability to master skills, have the autonomy to determine their course, and a higher purpose, employees will be motivated to build great things.

Daily Scrums Can Be More Effective

Daily scrums can be more effective by setting the context at the beginning of the stand-up. For example, including things like 1) who will be out of the office during the week 2) stories that must be completed that week 3) days left of the sprint

Kanban + Scrum for Maintenance Teams

For maintenance engineering teams, putting Kanban together with Scrum Sprints can be a very effective method of work. My team has constantly faced challenges of Customer Crisis disrupting our sprints and making it difficult to accurately commit to work that will be completed during the sprint. Making the sprints smaller can help because you can more easily commit to what you will complete during the week. If crisis items need to take priority, that is fine and because you are limiting your WIP (work in progress) through Kanban, you can still keep a focused flow of work that continuously delivers working software/systems.

Pairing or Swarming

Pairing or Swarming can help a team become more productive and produce higher quality work. Pairing is basically pair programming, where one person drives the computer and the other person navigates. This allows the person behind the keyboard to use his L-mode of his brain, while it opens up the other to be more creative, see the bigger picture, and use the R-mode of the brain. Swarming is essentially putting multiple people on a difficult task to push it through to completion.

Limit WIP

Setting a limit on the number of stories that can be in the WIP (work in progress) can facilitate pairing or swarming. For example, if you have 6 members of the team and you only allow 3 stories to be “In Progress”, it encourages team members to pair up to get a story done so that another story can go “In Progress”

Beware of Tool Traps

We often trap ourselves into a closed mindset by relying too much on our tools and processes. This can be very much like monkey traps, where a monkey reaches his hand through a small hole in a box to grab a banana. With his hand gripping the banana, his hand no longer fits back through the hole. The monkey could go free by simply letting go of the banana, but will stay trapped because of a refusal to let go. Which of our tools and processes are like the banana?

Lean

“Lean” is something that I should be learning more about. It basically takes the principles of lean manufacturing (Toyota) and applies principles to their companies. Some of the main principles of Lean include: reducing waste, becoming disciplined people, and minimizing work in progress.

Agile on Non-IT Projects

Agile principles and tools can help non-IT teams become more effective and to deliver value to their organization more quickly, and with higher quality. We looked at several case studies where law offices, insurance companies, construction jobs, and manufacturing plants adopted Agile methods and saw a strategic improvement in the way they delivered their products. The ironic thing is that much of Agile came from manufacturing, so the use case essentially brought best manufacturing practices back to another manufacturing company from a software perspective.

Office Design Matters

Office space can be optimized to better facilitate Agile practices. Private offices and cubicle walls can be detrimental to the efficiency of an Agile team. Open areas for pair programming, whiteboard spaces, and walls for post-its can help a team collaborate more easily. A radical change in office space cannot successfully be mandated from the top down. It has to be something that the team decides would be useful. Many teams that make the transition, while skeptical at first, find it to be very effective.

Agile Games to Teach Principles

Games can be a very effective way to teach principles to a team. Games can be invented from simple craft materials. An effective model for game invention is: 1) identify the problem to be addressed 2) Identify 2-3 Agile principles that would address the problems 3) build the game and Keep it Simple Sir 4) test the game 5) Prepare retrospective questions to facilitate learning.

Story Mapping

Story Mapping gives dimension to user desires for changing the world. By simply using different colored post-it notes, your team can quickly map out User Tasks, User Activities, Stories, and Release Features. Business people and developers alike can easily reference areas of the Story Map because of its simple organization.

All in all, it has been a great conference. For those who attended this event, what gems did you come away with?

I believe that most innovation comes from the question “How would I rather do this?” It seems pretty simple and obvious, but I can’t imagine a scenario where that question wouldn’t have been asked before something great had been created.

While I’m in the mood for promoting great services and products, I have to throw in a recommendation for Slimtimer. One way great businesses create meaning and a loyal following is by solving a pain better than anyone else. I believe Slimtimer has done that.

Slimtimer makes time tracking easy and painless and produces powerful reports. If the recording of your time isn’t made easy, then recording the time is usually put off to another day and the records will be mostly based off of memory and will be inaccurate. If the reports produced are not useful, then all of your effort in tracking your time will be in vain.

During my time as a web developer for BYU’s Creative Marketing department we used time sheets where we recorded how we spent our time in intervals of 15 minutes. This was usually a drab process that you “had to get done” at the end of the day. We did this on paper, and I’m not sure how well the information was actually used. It seemed like a waste of time.

In one startup company that I worked for, time tracking was completely neglected all together. This led to lots of wasted development time and left no good way for management to guide efforts in more productive tasks. It seemed that management had to make blind decisions.

Another startup I worked in tried to track time with a custom-built time tracking software, but it was so complex and difficult to use, that we often put off recording our time to the end of the week, which led to bad data. We ended up abandoning the practice of time tracking altogether.

In my current work as a freelancer, I’ve been empowered by Slimtimer’s simple time recording widget. It allows me to simply click on the task that I’m working on and the timer begins to track in the background. If I forget to start the timer, I can easily edit my entries in a beautiful time editing interface.

Slimtimer has very powerful reporting capabilities. Tasks can be tagged so you can segment your reports in the ways that you need them whether it be by ‘billable’ or ‘non-billable’, by client, or by project, or even by task. You can also share tasks and time entries with co-workers, so you can build reports for your entire team.

If you are tired of filling out timesheets, and would like to have a better understanding of how your team’s time is spent, I strongly recommend you check out Slimtimer.

This is Part 2 of my E-Myth vidcast series. The past few days I’ve had a lot of fun documenting processes and practices as Brian and I have focused our work on our business rather than working too hard inour business. We’re already seeing some results. I share what we’ve done in this vidcast.

Yesterday, Brian and I were given an opportunity of a lifetime. We were able to go and hear Seth Godin speak about his new book, The Dip, in person. I was really excited about this, and grateful for all of the work and effort that Phil and the Word Mob team had spent to make it happen.

I thought the event was handled really well, and it was great to mingle with other Utah professionals that share similar interests. Before Seth arrived, Patrick Byrne – the CEO of Overstock, and Judd Bagley gave a small presentation on Omuse and the goal it has in bringing together communities that are protected from sabotage.

When Seth came into the room, it was cool to see Patrick Byrne’s face light up and say with a smile, “Here’s Seth.” Patrick was standing off to the side of the stage at that time.

Anyways, Seth gave an awesome presentation on overcoming mediocrity and becoming a superstar by becoming the best in the world at what you do. I’ll write a little more later about my thoughts on the presentation, as I compile my notes together and put more thought into it.

As Brian and I were leaving the Salt Palace, we saw Seth on the side of the road flagging a taxi, and Phil pushing a Mercedes SUV out of traffic. We quickly turned around and offered to help out. Seth and Phil hopped in my humble little Honda Accord, and we raced off to the airport. It was pretty crazy in the car at first as we disputed about the best route to the airport. Read Phil’s story, it will give you somewhat of an idea of what went on.

The coolest part of the whole experience is that we got about 5 minutes of advice time from Seth pertaining to our new little company, Apriux. If hearing Seth speak live was an opportunity of a lifetime, I don’t know what I’d call this. It was incredible. Thanks Seth!

I feel bad that Phil’s day finish off as well as he’d hoped. He did pull off an extraordinary event. Hopefully he’ll get some more time with Seth another day.